WebRequest, 500 Internal Server Error, acessing response?

[Marcus]

Hi all,

I have some code that downloads an XML tree from a web server. If there is a
problem returning the requested XML tree from the server, it returns an XML
tree with the error message in a 500 internal server error response. I want
to get this error message, but WebRequest.GetResponse() throws an error
because of the server error, so I can't get a reference to the response. Is
there a way around this?

Code follows below.

Thanks!!
Marcus

try
{
request = WebRequest.Create(BridgeAddress);
byte[] data = Encoding.GetBytes(cmd);
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.ContentLength = data.Length;
Stream requestStream = request.GetRequestStream();
requestStream.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
requestStream.Close();
}
catch (Exception e)
{
throw new MyExecption("Connection failed", e);
}
try
{
response = request.GetResponse(); // throws exception on server error 500
return ExtractXml(response);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
try
{
xml = ExtractXml(response); // fails (of course)